Le Bernardin, pt. 2
There are restaurants I've been to that impress you with their flash, their creativity, their innovation, their bold determination to break new culinary ground.
Le Bernardin is not one of them.
Instead, Le Bernardin is a quiet, confident display of perfectly executed uncomplicated food. Not "easy to make" food, but simple preparations of high-quality ingredients prepared with a degree of finesse and skill unseen in virtually any other restaurant.
The Mrs. and I had a tasting menu. Here's what it included (and we had wine as well but my wine writing is even worse than my food writing so here's the summary - we liked them all except for the sake with the first course):
Thinly pounded smoked salmon carpaccio; toasted brioche and caviar. The salmon component of this dish was merely excellent smoked salmon. Nothing I haven't eaten before. However the caviar on toasted brioche was a revelation. I've always thought that caviar is possibly the most overrated food on Earth. Almost all the caviar I've tasted reminded me of vaguely fishy salt pellets. Not this caviar. It was subtle and sea-salty the way a perfectly fresh oyster is. And it was a perfect contrast to the smokiness of the salmon.
I'm going to use the word "perfect" a lot. Get used to it.
Seared Spanish mackerel, Parmesan crisp, sun dried tomato with black olive oil. The mackerel here was a subtle fish that was brought to life by the olive oil. There were some tiny basil leaves in the dish that the Mrs. really loved that I found overpowering.
Sauteed calamari filled with sweet prawns and shiitake mushrooms, calamari consomme. Two perfectly cooked calamari heads filled with a wonderful, earthy mixture of the mushrooms and prawns. The consomme was absolutely beautiful, a memory or echo of the flavor of the calamari heads themselves. The only clunker for me was that the fried tentacles that came with the heads were under seasoned although they were (here's that word again) perfectly fried and crispy.
Baked lobster, salsify, sauce gribiche. One of the dishes from the Top Chef episode filmed at the restaurant, the lobster was nicely cooked though the thinner end piece of the tail was a little tough for me and the sauce gribiche was a tad lumpy which ironically was one of the criticisms of Stefan's preparation of the dish on the show. These are picky complaints. This was the best lobster I've eaten outside of the Canadian Maritime provinces.
Escolar poached in extra virgin olive oil, sea beans and potato crisps, light red wine Bearnaise. Wow. Oh wow what a sauce. The Escolar is a mild fish but the sauce was absolutely ethereal. And the crisps were a nice touch, a whimsical nod to those of us who like putting potato chips on our tuna salad sandwich (Escolar is often also called "white tuna" even though it is actually a fish called the snake mackarel).
Crispy black bass, braised celery and parsnip custard. Iberico ham-green peppercorn sauce. The skin on the black bass was the single best element of any dish I ate that night. I said to the Mrs if I could be sent home with a bag of crispy bass skins and a gallon of that calamari consomme I would be one happy camper. This was another Top Chef dish; remember the infamous braised celery that did Jamie in? Actually, that celery didn't add much. It wasn't bad, but why bother braising celery? It's freakin' 90% water. The parsnip custard was actually parsnip 3 ways - mashed parsnips roughly the consistency of stiff mashed potatoes surrounded by a parsnip foam topped by a parsnip chip. I loved it. The Mrs hated it.
And after that there was dessert, which unfortunately was merely good but completely forgettable. There were two courses, one was a coconut sorbet kind of thing which we can't even find on the restaurant website and the other was a fairly ordinary chocolate ganache that I was excited to try because it was billed as "Chocolate Olive Oil" as the ganache was paired with extra virgin olive oil and Maldon sea salt. Well, I think the salt was missing from my plate and the chocolate was so bitter it overwhelmed the subtle oil.
On the bright side, the dessert wine they served with it (Zinfandel "late harvest" Dashe Cellar, Dry Creek Valley 2006) was quite nice, we were told that the "late harvest" moniker meant the grapes were left on the vine longer to become sweeter. Seeing as how I know nothing about wine I'll accept that explanation unless and until one of my more educated readers wants to set me straight.
We didn't see any celebrities or the Ripper himself, alas. There was a table of rich types of a certain age conversing loudly about where in Europe they wanted to retire to and how they've "seen a lot more Bentleys around lately". I guess the Great Depression II isn't for everyone after all.
Le Bernardin is not one of them.
Instead, Le Bernardin is a quiet, confident display of perfectly executed uncomplicated food. Not "easy to make" food, but simple preparations of high-quality ingredients prepared with a degree of finesse and skill unseen in virtually any other restaurant.
The Mrs. and I had a tasting menu. Here's what it included (and we had wine as well but my wine writing is even worse than my food writing so here's the summary - we liked them all except for the sake with the first course):
Thinly pounded smoked salmon carpaccio; toasted brioche and caviar. The salmon component of this dish was merely excellent smoked salmon. Nothing I haven't eaten before. However the caviar on toasted brioche was a revelation. I've always thought that caviar is possibly the most overrated food on Earth. Almost all the caviar I've tasted reminded me of vaguely fishy salt pellets. Not this caviar. It was subtle and sea-salty the way a perfectly fresh oyster is. And it was a perfect contrast to the smokiness of the salmon.
I'm going to use the word "perfect" a lot. Get used to it.
Seared Spanish mackerel, Parmesan crisp, sun dried tomato with black olive oil. The mackerel here was a subtle fish that was brought to life by the olive oil. There were some tiny basil leaves in the dish that the Mrs. really loved that I found overpowering.
Sauteed calamari filled with sweet prawns and shiitake mushrooms, calamari consomme. Two perfectly cooked calamari heads filled with a wonderful, earthy mixture of the mushrooms and prawns. The consomme was absolutely beautiful, a memory or echo of the flavor of the calamari heads themselves. The only clunker for me was that the fried tentacles that came with the heads were under seasoned although they were (here's that word again) perfectly fried and crispy.
Baked lobster, salsify, sauce gribiche. One of the dishes from the Top Chef episode filmed at the restaurant, the lobster was nicely cooked though the thinner end piece of the tail was a little tough for me and the sauce gribiche was a tad lumpy which ironically was one of the criticisms of Stefan's preparation of the dish on the show. These are picky complaints. This was the best lobster I've eaten outside of the Canadian Maritime provinces.
Escolar poached in extra virgin olive oil, sea beans and potato crisps, light red wine Bearnaise. Wow. Oh wow what a sauce. The Escolar is a mild fish but the sauce was absolutely ethereal. And the crisps were a nice touch, a whimsical nod to those of us who like putting potato chips on our tuna salad sandwich (Escolar is often also called "white tuna" even though it is actually a fish called the snake mackarel).
Crispy black bass, braised celery and parsnip custard. Iberico ham-green peppercorn sauce. The skin on the black bass was the single best element of any dish I ate that night. I said to the Mrs if I could be sent home with a bag of crispy bass skins and a gallon of that calamari consomme I would be one happy camper. This was another Top Chef dish; remember the infamous braised celery that did Jamie in? Actually, that celery didn't add much. It wasn't bad, but why bother braising celery? It's freakin' 90% water. The parsnip custard was actually parsnip 3 ways - mashed parsnips roughly the consistency of stiff mashed potatoes surrounded by a parsnip foam topped by a parsnip chip. I loved it. The Mrs hated it.
And after that there was dessert, which unfortunately was merely good but completely forgettable. There were two courses, one was a coconut sorbet kind of thing which we can't even find on the restaurant website and the other was a fairly ordinary chocolate ganache that I was excited to try because it was billed as "Chocolate Olive Oil" as the ganache was paired with extra virgin olive oil and Maldon sea salt. Well, I think the salt was missing from my plate and the chocolate was so bitter it overwhelmed the subtle oil.
On the bright side, the dessert wine they served with it (Zinfandel "late harvest" Dashe Cellar, Dry Creek Valley 2006) was quite nice, we were told that the "late harvest" moniker meant the grapes were left on the vine longer to become sweeter. Seeing as how I know nothing about wine I'll accept that explanation unless and until one of my more educated readers wants to set me straight.
We didn't see any celebrities or the Ripper himself, alas. There was a table of rich types of a certain age conversing loudly about where in Europe they wanted to retire to and how they've "seen a lot more Bentleys around lately". I guess the Great Depression II isn't for everyone after all.
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